I've been asked recently if we were busy, or had we all been furloughed?

Well, there's no chance of not being busy with animal welfare work - especially that dealing with wildlife. They don't think "I'd best not get into bother/have an accident/lose my parents etc etc"; they all still need the same care and attention as they would any other year.

The difference for a lot of rescue sanctuaries this year has been the sudden drop in volunteers; severely impacting on the amount of work the individual centres can cope with. Often the family-run sanctuaries have found that only the family themselves were regularly and reliably available to work, and has meant very long tiring hours/days for these true champions of the rescue and rehabilitation world.

I have kept in contact with them throughout, and the usual evening and weekend calls have come in unabated from the different organisations throughout the UK; this year more vets than ever have sought advice as to what operations are viable in different cases, as many have found their local rescues were full to capacity yet still wanted to do their very best to help out where they could - which was good to hear.

We were due to relocate a bouquet of five rescued young common pheasants to one of our reserves today; however with the very poor weather forecast for Tuesday/Wednesday this week, this has been put back until next weekend. Fingers crossed for calmer days ahead! We will let you know when this next special release has been able to go ahead.

Many thanks to you all for your continued support of our work with wild birds.